


the diver's wife

by magesamell



Series: funeral bell [4]
Category: Dragon Age (Video Games), Dragon Age: Inquisition
Genre: Angst with a Happy Ending, Canon-Typical Violence, F/M, Fade Dreams, Genocide, If you can believe that, Past Character Death, Post-Trespasser, Self-Harm Themes, Tranquil Inquisitor, Tranquility, War, Well of Sorrows
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-08-11
Updated: 2016-08-11
Packaged: 2018-08-08 01:22:05
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence, Major Character Death
Chapters: 2
Words: 12,529
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/7737739
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/magesamell/pseuds/magesamell
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>A tranquil Lavellan does her best to save the man she loves, even if means defeating the All Mother herself.</p>
            </blockquote>





	1. PART ONE

_hear ye, hear ye_

_The Good Commander Lavellan has executed lord fen’harel_

_Nations of Thedas, rejoice_

 

-o-

 

The forest is quiet, now.

He tries not to make a habit of visiting, but there is no use for any such effort now.

She is dead. He is dead. Indulgence is all he has left.

The forest is bare, veins of ice-river, and snow-laden, and the chill almost numbs out the tug he feels in his chest, the thunder that resounds in his jaw.

The snow is quiet, and he does not wish to fight anymore.

 

-o-

 

Someone is shaking him awake.

He screws his eyes shut, turns his head from the shifting smoke, the sulfur-stained air. The last thing he wants is to be awake —

But someone is shaking him. Harder, now.

“Wake up,” her voice whispers, and, like a fool, he leans into the touch. Opens his eyes.

But his  _vhenan_ is dead, and her ghost stares down at him with perfect tranquility. The effigy shines white and grey; a reflection, a diffraction; she might as well be made of light for the shallow, neutral transparency of her face.

His heart clenches; stuttering as it reaches and stumbles over empty, barren air.  

“We need to leave,” she informs him without tone. “Put these on.”

 

-o-

 

He dresses as quick as he can without error. The leggings and tunic are simple enough; however, his hand shakes when he tries clasping the cloak across his shoulders. The ghost watches him with her grey-eyes. If she has any protest to his clumsiness, she doesn’t make her opinion known, nor does she offer to help.

Once he is set she does grab his hand, leading him out of the meagre room that served as his cell for no more than four hours. The base is by no means tranquil even at this early hour; he can hear footsteps around every adjacent corridors, voices behind every passing door. The ghost pays little mind — she slinks, quick-footed, with little hesitation through the torch-light hallways.

The ghost moves without apprehension, without hesitancy, without fear of being caught. It is unnerving. He doubts she is sanctioned to whisk him away from the resistance’s custody. Even so, they arrive at a heavy door with no trouble at all.

Instead of opening it, the ghost doubles over, searching her hip pack. After a moment, she gestures — and then again, more hurriedly, and he realizes she wants him to open the door.

Well, he hopes there’s no dragon on the other side.

There isn’t — only stairs leading down into impenetrable darkness. Not much more consoling, but he’d take it. Maybe this flight was approved. Maybe this was his death sentence. The ghost would exact her revenge whatever way she saw fit and then leave him to rot in the dankest cavern of Minratheous.

The sound of fire catching breaks his thoughts. He looks, and the ghost has lit a match, using it to light one of the torches by the door. Then she takes the torch in one hand, his hand in the other, and starts them down the stone steps. Their shadows grow lean and spindly as they descend.

Another oddity. A mage foregoing magic in favor of flint. Well, she is no mage anymore — her bow is draped over her shoulder. He can tell the string is biting into the bare skin at her collar, chafing her skin with every step.

She is so — _wrong_. Hollow. Barren. No mana flecks from her skin. No dreaming in her marrow. She reminds him of a sharpened bone spear. Cutting. Clean. Something that had once lived, fashioned in death into a weapon.

Eventually the tunnel leads back to the surface, and she hefts open the doors herself and lifts herself up onto the street. He follows once she is clear — and nearly chokes on the air.

It smells. The city is singed, streets smoking with magic and thunder. The veil snapping back to where it had been, more rigid than before. Overhead, the sky is purple, washing the cobbled-stoned streets in red and blue. The ghost does not hesitate before taking his hand again and setting off through the alley. Their footsteps make no sound in their flight.

She hasn’t yet said where they are going. Out of the city — south, he can tell. Her intentions are entirely obscure — she only grips his hand with her wooden appendage, tugging him along with the cold determination of a machine carrying out commands. Otherwise, she is tight-lipped and serene.

He is miserable. Oh, she should have killed him. Why _hasn’t_ she killed him? Where could she possibly be taking him for an execution?

She might sense his thoughts — or he might be hyperventilating — and so she tightens her grasp on his hand. They dip into a hushed alley; she pushes him into the warm brick of a war-burnt building. And then all at once she releases him, turns her pale eyes to meet his own.

“It were be easier if you didn’t resist me,” the ghost reminds him.  A hint of irritation — maybe his imagination — colors her stone-voice.

“Oh, you think I’m resisting, do you?” He laughs, but the sound is breathy. Weak. “I’m following you blindly into the night. That should give you some idea of how pathetic I am.”

She breaths. It might be a scoff. She turns her head away from him, looking in the direction of the main road. Keeping watch. Her hair shifts with the motion, over her shoulders — snow-white against the dark leather of her cuirass. It catches light in a way it never did when she still kept her dark coloring. Now, in the alley, she is pale and limpid. The river has washed away all her color.

“You are obviously upset,” she says at last.

So the automaton has some sense. Or, she has the memories. He knows she must have this look of his memorized — how many times did inescapable dread swallow every kiss, followed every smile?

His _vhenan_ is dead. But the ghost has her answers.

“Why didn’t you kill me before?”

He’s been wondering. She’s implied as much, when they clashed during the war.

“I didn’t want to then,” she answers simply.

It makes sense. This is a matter too big for small public executions, for triumphant final blows. This is personal. She had told him before — she was going to _destroy_ him.

Well, she had succeeded. The very moment she first lay in the riverbed she’d doomed unto him his fate. He would die utterly alone.

The worst part is — he cannot truly blame her.

“So you will make my death special. Unique.”

“No.” She meets his gaze levelly — and there is no blood rage in her eyes like there was before — when fire still plucked at her fingertips, when only the faintest of white blood stained her roots, her eyes, her skin  —  when she’d promised his destruction. Now, she only stares with clear-hearted indifference.

“I have use for you,” the ghost tells him, and dread seizes his spine.

 

-o-

 

She straps her bow onto her mechanical arm before they leave the alley. The weight obviously unbalances her, but she compensates without complaint. He knows that now they are leaving the resistance’s sphere of influence. Here in the outskirts of city, they could encounter anything from a simple man for hire or one of Mythal’s thralls.

It’s only been mere hours since the ghost had brought him to his knees. His mana hasn’t yet replenished, much less his true power. As such, he is completely defenseless. The purple night oppresses overhead.

He eyes the ghost’s bow. Nothing between them and the leftover armies of Mythal but some wood and iron.

The bow swings up — _twang_ — and the attacker’s body hits the ground. The ghost surveys her kill for only a moment.

“We should move on.”

-o-

 

They sit huddled in the hold of what he strongly suspects is a smuggling ship. She had known the owner, told him to pass along her love to a name obviously in code. The man agreed to grant them passage to the other side of the continent.

It had started raining towards the end of the negotiations. Now she shivers, rigidly, next to him. Proud as a statue. Rain drops slide down her nose, her neck — into the back of her shirt. The moonlight glimmers across her jawline.

He asks her where the ship is going.

“South,” she says.

 

-o-

 

In the morning, once they receive confirmation that land has receded behind the horizon, the ghost allows them to go above deck. Out here, off shore, under the unbroken planes of sea and sky — the world does not look as fractured. The ship sways in time with his breath. It could be peaceful.

In the sunlight his keeper appears even more waifish. She keeps being approached by the crew — _hellos_ and _thanks yous_ and _Serah Lavellans_. She nods at each of them, but her lips never part from that grim line.

He wonders if she is worried about pursuers, or her notoriety, or even the rocking of the deck.

She doesn’t speak to him. Neither do any of the crew, or her friend the captain.

He is alone, the sea salt buffeting his cheeks.

 

-o-

 

He dreams of her skin — the curling ivy of her _vallaslin_ , framing her cheekbones, the freckles on her shoulders. Her hair, her eyes, her sigh. The subtle tug of her mouth. In joy. In grief. She was always a challenge to read, but she was alive and thrumming under his touch. But only for a instant — he chases her fleeting warmth, her half-hidden smiles. Sun on snow. The white, burning sky. The quiet burn of her lips on his.

She’s gone before he can let her go. All the corridors of Skyhold are cold and empty. One more room and he’ll find her there. He has to, he has to tell her — the truth, the most important words caged in his heart. If he tells her she will stay. The wind whistles. Doors fly open. Metal and wood. A flash of brown and green. Strains of lavender and leather.

Her image always receding. The snow falls ever harder.

 

-o-

 

The storm knocks him awake. All of the warmth of sleep immediately drains from his bones, and he shivers. The ceiling of the deck is resonating with drumming rain. Just a storm.

The body beside him shifts — she is pressing into his side. In her sleep. A warm line against him.

He feels it as an ache when she wakes — a smooth slide into wakefulness. She sits up only after a moment, apparently unembarrassed by their proximity.

“A storm,” she notes. “I hope it does not delay us. I have a very specific schedule.” She looks at him, as if expecting him to commiserate.

She is too close. Too warm. The sheet is sliding down her shoulders.

“Don’t worry your vacant head too much,” he bites out. “You have all the time in the world for whatever sadism you’re planning.”

She tilts her head. “True,” she concedes. The motion of her head makes her hair swish. Weak — his eyes dart down. The freckles on her shoulders are still there. He is sick.

“I had plans for you, too.” He says quickly, looking away, fixing his gaze on unmarked, sweet-smelling boxes that surround them. “I would save you,” he says, “Or kill you. I hadn't decided which was kindest. I — never expected this.”

“Oh?” The syllable echoes vacantly around the hold. He closes his eyes. Sick — to death.

“I had expected your anger. Your grief. It seemed natural one of us would kill the other once we faced each other at last. I never expected — this. To be greeted with a shell.”

He never thought her so cruel. No, he had always been the cruel one. But she had surprised him. As she always did. Whatever use she had for him now was bound to be her intimate revenge. He wants to mourn (his,her)their death. But he deserves this fate.

Out of the quiet dark, she whispers: “You see me as less than a person now.”

“How can I not?” He snarls, full of white anger, whirling to glare at the ghost. “You — you don't feel. You don’t care.” He spits in the face of her calm countenance, and it only enrages him with all the grief he’s been dying to let free. “You're not — you don't love me anymore.”

He snaps his mouth shut. How pathetic. Oh, she should kill him. If she had any feeling in her at all, she’d put him out of his misery.

But she doesn’t. She stares at him with no emotion. And it isn’t like her reserve, or her closed-faced sorrow. Nothing flickers in her eyes or tugs at her mouth. She is worn down, and smooth, and flat as a river stone. She beholds his rage and pain and heartbreak with nary a sympathetic glance. She must truly hate him, under the tranquility, to make him bear witness to this.

“That is untrue—” She tells him.

“What?”

“And unfair of you to say, since you were the one who left me in the first place. Did you want me to wait for you?” She tilts her head with something like defiance, a mechanical jut of the jaw.

“I wanted you to stop me.” _Save me._ “And I wanted you to love me afterwards. I wanted—”  He stops himself, catches his hand from reaching out to her. “It’s of no consequence. It was — foolish. Selfish.” _Pathetic_. _Odious._

She hates him, and he deserves it.

“Maybe,” she whispers. “But common. We should sleep.”

(They sleep, feet apart now, backs turned against each other; not even the rocking of the sea can persuade them to breach the divide.)

 

-o-

 

She warns him before the ship even docks at Denerim, as if he has paid no attention to the waking world at all these past years: elves are viewed suspiciously, now more than ever before. There are frequent witch hunts for disciples of Fen’Harel. If the locals see their ears they will be at best detained and at worst lynched. It wasn’t as bad here as in Orlais, where—

“I’m aware,” he bites out.  

The ghost pauses in tying her boot, peering up at him vacantly. “Wear your hood,” she says, nodding at his cloak.

“I could cast a glamour charm,” he reminds her.

“And alert every templar or college mage within five miles,” she dismisses, standing up and reaching for her pack.

“I can be discrete!” he hisses, irritable. “I’m not exactly a fledgling mage, if you’ve forgotten.”

The ghost turns to him, serene, pulling her hood over her head with a flick of her wrist. “Oh, I know. You tore down the veil and unleashed an army of Mythall’s thralls.” She takes his hand, leads him to the stairs that lead up to the deck. “I was there.”

He can’t tell if she’s being sarcastic or just daft. Likely the second.

“You really think a glamour charm will alert the authorities in the midst of all the ambient magic right now?” He follows her obediently off the ship and onto the crowded docks, speaking quick and low at her ear.

“They’re looking for glamour charms,” she insists. “They’re looking for _us_ ,” she says, indicating with a tilt of her chin a painted advertisement on the brick side of a fishery.

**WANTED FOR QUESTIONING**

**ANY ELF BARING THE DALISH FACE TATTOOS**

**OR**

**ANY ELF WITH WHITE HAIR**

“You are wanted?” he questions lowly, staring at the calm line of her profile.

“Our departure wasn’t widely known in the resistance. They knew that I would deal with you, but little else. It is likely my companions did not expect my absence.

“But the Resistance is more discreet,” she continues, tugging him along into the market streets. “If you noticed — that was the royal seal. Anora wants me for her own reasons. I am, technically, wanted for terrorism in Ferelden.”

“Terrorism?” His curiosity piques.

“I lead some elves out of the city,” she dismisses. “Much like what I am doing right now.”

He almost laughs.

“In the wartime mentality any amassing of elves was highly feared,” the ghost says, stopping before an aging brick facade “I must inquire after our horse. You would not be welcomed inside.” She gazes at him appraisingly. “Keep your head low.”

She pushes the building’s door open with one palm, her hand covering a painted symbol on its wooden exterior. The inside of the establishment stinks; all the stench of the docks congealing in the air. Someone is making lard, or maybe soap. Vats of it.

The ghost approaches the desk, speaking lowly but clearly to the teller. The mark on the door is again painted on the side of the desk; a bastardization of the Amell crest, simplified lines crisscrossing into a efficient tag.

Just his luck the ghost’s contact was some sort of slaughterhouse.

“Who is that?”

He is careful not to meet the accusing glare of the teller.

“No one to concern yourself with,” the ghost answers.

“The runners said you would be alone,” the teller insists, agitated.

He watches the ghost shift, straighten. “You would be foolish to report his presence. The resistance would suspend your stipend and the city guard would seize your warehouse for a month at least, if they did not arrest you on suspicion of harboring elves.” She folds her hands together. “Do you have a horse for me or not?”

The teller narrows her eyes. “No.”

“Unfortunate.” the ghost says. “If we meet again, do not give me reason to shoot you.”

They leave the warehouse, foreboding weighing in the air like sulfur.

 

-o-

 

The anxiety that had followed them like plague since the docks finally erupts in Denerim’s outskirts, mud-shacks facing a long line of inland forest.

“Do _not_ cast,” she hisses, as shadows jump and plunge, footsteps thudding on the ground.

“That is foolish—”

The ghost swivels, strikes out with the hard bend of her bow. He misses the motion that produces the blade in her hand — but he doesn’t miss the sleek cut the ghost splits through their attacker’s stomach, blood spraying warm and wet. She lays the body down, wrenching her knife free as her head whips up, scanning the end of the street.

“I forgot — her third option. The gangs,” she mutters, fingers tracing the emblem on the dead man’s arm guard. “We are exposed here,” she says, standing up.

The ghost turns her placid face to him. “I will kill them.”

His reply is cut off by the sound of footsteps behind them, the fingers tugging on his sleeve. He turns just in time to see the woman fall. The ghost circles him, sliding into his line of vision.

“You have to leave the city—”

“No, I will help you—”

“No!” She touches his chest, shoulders. Pulls the hood over his head with frenzy. “These are elf-killers. They recognize you and you are dead. They recognize me and might think twice about killing the herald of Andraste.”

“The humans haven’t revered you in years—”

Her palm connects with his shoulder. “There is a safehouse two miles southwest of Denerim. It has the mark of the resistance. You remember the warehouse?”

He nods despite his protest.

“You must go. Go and stay there.” Her empty eyes bore into his, intense and intent and something in them he’s seen before — his memories rock with the sea and fall with the snow and he finds himself nodding, again.

“I will be very displeased if you are not there when I come,” the ghost intones, and shoves him away, the blood in her hair shining in the lantern light.

 

-o-

 

The ghost was _angry_.

He realizes this halfway through his adrenaline-soaked run from the city to the forest. He only has to fell two of his hunters before he disappears safe within the trees, searching for the trail to the safehouse. Only two, but one got too close; blame his lack of recent close combat practice or perhaps the lingering curse that cut his true power down several thousand times.

His footsteps thump between his hammering heartbeat, between thundering memory.

Her face flickers in summer lamp light, in the dim underdeck of the ship, in moonlight of the Crestwood glen, in early sun and Frostback snow. He knows that head-tilt, recognizes that angle of her chin from when he first spoke of the Dalish to his _vhenan_ between snow flurries and furrowed brows.

 _How can a tranquil be angry?_ he asks himself as he spots the simplified Amell crest shining white on the side of cabin two miles south of the city.

 _How can she can be_ angry _with him, after all this?_ he asks as he shoves the door open.

 _How can he seriously ask himself that?_ he asks as he brings fire to the hearth, striking flint to coal.

How could he just leave her there? Defenseless? She was only tranquil — there was no way she could kill them all with only arrows and blade.

He sits in the creaking chair by the hearth, covers his face with his hands.

How could he have left her for dead? How could have he run away from her anger, surrendered himself to that fear bred in his bones at the mere sight of her ire and accusation, dread erupting from his stomach, up and out and breaking his body into a dead run?

_Why must he always be such a damned coward?_

The cabin is quiet, the fire by his side sputtering dead, smothered by the damp and oppressive summer air. He catches the smoke with a barrier, rolls it smoothly back into the air. Covers his tracks.

He imagined it. He must have. A tranquil did not emote. A tranquil did not anger. He imagined it, because he was a sorry and guilty fool that projected all his self-hatred onto a blank canvas of a corpse.

His chest still aches against his rationalizations. Under the fear gripping his heart, a sour, slicing hope strains, shaking his ribs and stealing his breaths. A lie — a lie — the ghost does not feel, but if she _did_ —

His body crumples of its own accord, he presses his nose to the floor in prayer and exhaustion.

 

-o-

 

The door shakes open  in the early hours of the morning, orange peaking from behind the horizon and the door, framing the ghost’s iridescent form as she stumbles in, blood seeping between her fingers.

“I was stabbed,” she states, ducking away from his attention, collapsing into the chair he had just vacated. “There is a medical kit just under there — _ahh_ , a poultice, and the wraps.” She winces as she tears her tunic, exposing a bright wound curving her stomach.

“That’s ridiculous. Let me—” He brings the white glow of magic to his fingertips, reaches for her—

“No!” The word cuts through the air, strong through her trembling lips and stuttering chests. His eyes follow the blood as it drips onto the floor, sticky and slow. The apparition is melting like ice in the heat.

He meets her gaze again. “You want to bleed out?” He makes his voice as cold and hard as a tranquil’s.

The ghost regards him with her wide, grey eyes. No anger. No fear. Nothing there at all, nothing there to greet him. But she slowly shakes her head, gestures her acquiescence.

Without pause he presses alight fingertips into the wound.

The touch startles her — he means to withdraw, but she covers his hand with hers, pressing the magic into her skin.

He thinks he understands, then. What must it feel like to be tranquil and feel power on your skin, out of reach. She must feel it — a tranquil would not have startled on pain or touch alone.

He heals her with the rising sun, the sunlight guiding her skin back to wholeness, blood sapping up and absorbing back into her veins. Her breath slows, and quiets.

When he is finished — she looks — unhappy.

“You are well?” he asks.

“I am well,” she confirms, ghosting her fingertips over her stomach.

After a moment: “I couldn’t feel you. I thought — I would feel something. What magic must feel like to people with no mana.” She presses harder on her stomach, watches her skin dimple and sping back taut and flat.

“I felt nothing.” She tilts her head, curious and something more.  “Only the pain receding.”

“You are tranquil,” he informs her curtly, wiping the blood off his hands with the remains of her tunic. “Normal mortals have some connection to the Fade. You have none. You will never feel anything.”

Never.

The woman is unoffended from this assessment, nodding to herself. She looks at him then. “Thank you for listening,” she says. Something in her gaze makes him uneasy. “You could have run away.”

He turns away then, searches the cabin for water to clean up. “And go where?” he remarks, finding a bottle of alcohol by the medical kit. That would do nicely.

She’s silent as he cleans his hands. “Hide in the woods.”

“We’re doing that anyway.”

(Under his touch, she had felt _alive._ )

 

-o-

 

In the morning his companion decides that there will be no more horses, carriages, or carts. No more trusting of human or elven cityfolk alike.

“I knew there was risk of detection, but I thought we would have more time before rumours broke out.” She adjusts the straps on her mechanical arm. “Those men thought we were agents of Fen’Harel. Now every elf in Denerim will be brought in by the guard.” She pulls on a buckle in what might be frustration.

“It was already martial law there,” he reasons, a little bewildered to find himself comforting a tranquil.  

“Before they would have been brought in on mere suspicion. Now they will be brought in  on suspicion on being _us_.”

Finished with her adjustments, the woman disappears into the treeline, gesturing for him to follow.

He does, unthinkingly.

It’s only later he realizes this the first time she trusts him enough to follow of his own accord, and the first time he does so with all the ease of an old habit picked up again.

 

-o-

 

“What plan do you have, exactly?”

They walk in soaked swamplands, Fereldan rain running down the back of their necks. The sky is gray but the grass is green and nowhere is the haunting beauty like that of the Storm Coast. This is a world at war; a world caught between life and death. A good a time as any to inquire after his place here in that world.

She turns her gaze on him, answers: “It requires a mage. You still know something about that, yes?”

There it is again — a trace. Not her voice, or her manner. But she speaks, and the words might belong to his _vhenan_ , and it makes him sick, but he can’t turn away. He’s exhausted that particular avenue.

She casts him an impenetrable look, and turns back to the cold torrent.

“Perhaps,” he allows, and follows, analyzing the curvature of neck, searching for — whatever might be there.

 

-o-

 

On the fifth day of unrelenting rain and mud-slogged roads, he presses her on the issue.

It’s been days of inescapable wet cold and exhausted, closed-off conversation. So much effort, and for what? An endless trek in the most forsaken corner of Thedas.

“Surely,” he huffs, falling in line with her labored stride — “it would have been easier to kill me and—”

“No. You forget.” She walks quicker, raising her knees and outpaces him. It rains on.

“What? What do you mean?”

She waves him off, the gears in her mechanized arm clinking. But he persists, catching her arm. Here she overbalances, her harness tugging her back to the arm. She looks at him sharply — and he knows now for sure. Between the water sluicing down around them, she _is_ angry, in her tranquil way. Her hair mats grey to her face and her pale lips purse in undeniable, quiet rage.

“What am I forgetting?” he demands again.

She — hesistates, and then curls her wooden fingers around his wrist.  “I'm not going to abandon you, Solas.”

The thing _does_ lie.

“You’ve already abandoned me!” he explodes, the seething anger from the hold of the ship returing to him in full force. “You left me! It wasn’t enough to kill me, was it? You had to include me in whatever perverted psychological revenge you’re planning. And now you say — you — you don't know what it's like.” The final words come softer. He looks away from the blankness of her face. “To reach out and have nothing meet you there.”

To be reduced to this. Haunting a ghost through the trees. Both of them alive only in technicalities.

Her hand — her real hand — startles him, brushes his face, his cheek-bone, a whisper of a touch. She catches his eye, and he wants — he can’t help wanting —

“Solas, I'm just sleeping.”

She releases him, a simple thing, and turns to march ahead, determination set deep between her shoulderblades.

“We need to find the lyrium.”

 

-o-

 

Everything is hurried after that. Fear and hope bludgeon against his ribs too quickly and too intensely for him to tell them apart; he watches his companion’s anxiety rise every day. She starts missing kills, starts trembling when she unstraps her weapon at the day’s end. Whenever he voices concern she reminds him of the lyrium, which they will be finding very soon.

He can’t imagine what use a tranquil would have with lyrium and a mage prisoner, but it’s bound to be very bad or very foolish.

They outpace themselves every day, bones creaking against the rain and dirt. She leads them ever south, shakes with the anctipation of a promise being at last fulfilled, and he can only follow. It is only his fate, only what he deserves.

 

-o-

 

They find the lyrium in the Hinterlands. A secluded rock outcropping surrounded by the hills, a grove hosting a camouflaged chest full of ice-blue potion. Reaching under her cloak, she pulls out and unfolds a piece of parchment he hadn’t even known had been in her possession. She hands it to him, an offering over the open chest between them, a treasure, a pearl.

The note is worn, but well taken care of, and details the instructions of how to reverse the tranquility ritual.

One, shaky hand — one that learnt writing as an adult — has written the bulk of instruction, but he recognizes Cassandra’s hand in some notes: comments on how Lavellan had handled the initial process. Sick, at this stage. Anxious, at this one. Tremors. Here, she lost all emotion. Something not quite like amnesia, more like an excision. They aren’t sure if they should worry. How much they should worry.

Lavellan’s hand, too, in the bottom. In the tongue of Arlathan, she writes:

" _hello_ _again_ , my old, beloved heart”

 

-o-

 

“You — it wasn't permanent.”

Solas half expects to look up and see his heart smiling, in quiet, proud humor — but the ghost still regards him with cool indifference, their torch light flickering across her countenance.

“No,” she confirms. The truth.

“I knew it would hurt you. I knew if I cut you off — totally cut you off — it would expedite victory.”

He breaths. Tries not to cry. “Ah.”

“And—” She surprises him, speaking low and quiet and looking away. A truth hard to bear even through the ice. “I wanted control,” she admits. “I wanted to not feel like a victim.”

“You could never be just a victim.”

She looks at him, disbelief knotting her mouth. But then she reaches out — he holds his breath — and taps the parchment in his hands.

“I need help wading back to shore.” she says. “I have — so many stones. I can't reach them yet. I need a dreamer to help pull them off. And to start lyrium doses again.”

“You did this—”

“My plan was always to bring you back. Bring you here. It worked.”

Solas smiles.  “You were very sure of yourself, weren't you?”

“Perhaps.” She doesn’t smile. But for once the determination in her face doesn’t drip with grim grief. He doesn’t know how to recognize hope in a tranquil face, but she sparkles, white and grey and shining brighter than their torches, than the thousand stars overheard.

“Will you help me?” Lavellan asks.

 

-o-

 

_Now that the magic is gone can we finally rebuild._

_Nations of Thedas,_ **rejoice!**

  



	2. PART TWO

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> *puts Hawke & the Kirkwall Krew in fic they don't belong in because I miss them*

_I know we must abide_

_each by the rules that bind us here:_

_the divers, and the sailors, and the women on the pier._

_But how do you choose your form?_

_How do you choose your name? How do you choose your life?_

_How do you choose the time you must exhale,_

_and kick, and rise?_

 

-o-

 

It’s slow. And painful.

It's the un-sticking of her throat, the re-tethering of a zephyr already half lost to the seascape. She tries to find purchase, fingers digging through rushing water — but there is no breath in her lungs, only vacuum, and she rises and sinks in tumbling violence. One stone. Another.

It is a horrible way to wake each morning.

But sometimes it is nearly bearable, and it is these days she likes best. She will wake up beside him when the world is warm, delight in buoyant bones, and when she reaches for him he is real and she is real. Solid. There. Her blood warms.

Other mornings, she wakes gasping, terrified, devastated. And then like the calm slide of rain, her heart plunges into a wicked rage that bursts and bursts until she snaps back to the quiet river cold.

(Solas is always unsure — pendulum swinging, grief and tempered happiness and she can feel it — the desire, the longing. A river dam. He's waiting for her to come home)

Every morning is a bruise. A question. A memory. She's a monster of many faces. They all take their turn, they all seize a day for their own.

But Solas is always there at the end. He is real, and steady, and constant. And when they lie down to dream (in the damp, in the grass, in the hay and cotton and stone and among the trees, among the stars)

he wrenches another stone away.

 

-o-

 

She remembers: Lavellan is not just _her_ name. It's her clan’s name. It's a name built for many, but she's the only one left. That loneliness settles deep in her blood, rushing and thundering and pulsing, the sharp beat of her grief.

Deshanna — who called her Da’len — one of many she couldn’t save. She remembers.

 

-o-

 

When he asks her where she would like to go, she tells him she loves the plains best. It’s where she grew up. Open land and open sky; a world for the People.

“But, for now,” she says, “we have to be no one. Refugees. Gwaren?”

He nods, and, taking her hand, kisses her knuckles.

That night, she thinks she might smell him, flickering over her, hands on her chest. Wool. Pine. A light beyond the surface. She knows him. He's been here before, he’s always been here; the wolf at the door; blood and fur and — lifting, now — she remembers — and sinks —

 

-o-

 

She had left Cassandra to die.

It had not been part of the plan. Mythal had detected them — somehow — even without the beat of the dark pearl. And then the thralls descended.

It was a blood fight. Skin tearing. Bones crunching. The sounds — her head is too empty for them, and they echo and echo. She killed so many people. So many elves, twisted into new shapes, the memory of red templars, dripping the Blight: the brutal image of the Elvhenan.

They knock her down, they tear at her throat — and Cassandra strikes with her shield, a rampart against the sea of the dead.

“Go!” Cassandra demands. “Do what we came here to do.”

And a recruit tugs on her elbow, and she nods — because it is logical tactic. Hold them off. Give them time.

They slice through the thronging mass of flesh, bracing against the heavenly lightning, and she cannot stop herself from looking back, tranquil fool she is—

but there is only the horde, no Cassandra in sight.

As if she never existed.

 

-o-

 

She is certain: the grief will drag her under.

But he never lets that happen.

“Remember what I told you, _masa’lath_?” He murmurs in lilting reverence, holding her and her heavy breaths. “You will survive this. You always survive. Your spirit—”

“My spirit,” she echos wildly, her pearl chafing against her muscle, her heart.

“You’re indomitable, my love. You saved—”

 _Cassandra,_ her mind shrieks

He moves his hands to her neck. “You saved them. Everyone. You saved me. You saved us and you survived, _please,_ do not forget—”

(She does forget, sometimes. Sometimes her hysteria burns her memory away, and sometimes her lover is her enemy)

“You’re coming back,” Solas whispers. “You’re coming back to me.” He grips her tighter. “You’re coming back to me,” he repeats, and says it again, softer.

“Cassandra,” she gasps.

He breathes sharp, she can feel the inhalation on her skin. And then he moves away — _no_! She reaches for him in protest, but he only slides far enough to grip her shoulders. Run his hands down her arms. And then he draws her in close again, rocking her.

“It’s okay,” he says at last. “It’s okay. She rests easy now.”

“So many — I, it was _me_ —”

She feels his swallow against her own neck.

“It’s okay,” he says again. “They’re dead but we are here. We survived it.”

That’s a truth that taste sour, but she forgets it for now.

“We will remember them,” Solas assures her.

She forgets for now. She buries herself into his embrace. She smells him: Wool. Pine.

 

-o-

 

They decide not to take the Brecilian passage to Gwaren. The road garners no more ease than the forest for the two of them, and there is less chance to encounter any foe or frightened friend. The innkeep at the village does warn them that the forest contains powerful spirits. Werewolves, even.

“The Warden,” Solas says, nodding in understanding. Lavellan reads the quirk of his lip. “The Warden encountered weres in the Brecilian, did she not?”

“Aye,” the innkeep says. “If there’s weres in there you don’t know what else. Dalish, roaming elves, abominations of all sorts.”

“We are armed,” Lavellan reassures her. “You have to have some knowhow these days.”

The innkeep nods sadly. “Very true, miss. The world isn’t kind. My boy—, he fought in the Queen’s army before, everything—”

“He was very brave,” Solas says. “The world will remember him. It grows kinder every day.”

“I’d like to believe that,” says the innkeeper, touching fingers to her lips.

 

-o-

 

“So are you scared of the werewolves?” She knocks his shoulder with her own.

“Hah!” he laughs, and she mirrors his smile. “Well, I suppose I shouldn’ get too cocky. I hardly can out-wolf them now. But I suspect — if all else — the were rumors are false. It is a rare infliction — and if Mythal did curse the humans in this area, there would be more than rumors.”

“Probably no Dalish either,” Lavellan sighs. The sun beats down on them though a clear sky.

“Likely not.” Solas confirms. “This is a blighted place, but it was remote from the fight. Anything might have happened. We won’t know—”

“Until we dream.”

“As you say.”

They keep silent. “You know, I think I agree with you.” He looks at her in question, and she continues: “About the world getting kinder. You are kind. The forest is kinder.” She gestures around them. For all the warnings of weres, the Brecilian’s magic never drips beyond the pal that presses down upon the treetops.

“That’s what must be done, yes? We must honor the living as much as we honor the dead.”

“I don’t know what I think about that. I think—” She sighs, giving up. “Maybe I’m only allowed one thought per day.”

He laughs. “You say that, but you started joking again.”

“Hmm. Maybe I was joking the whole time. You were just too slow.”

“I confess I am rather slow around you.”

“That so?” She tilts her head at him, peering up through her lashes.

“You demand the attention,” he says, and tugs on the lock of her hair by her ear. His hand brushes her cheek, and something — something rings in her gut. Bright and satisfied. The pearl-death in her breast is dull, and she can only hear his smile and see his laughter.

“Interesting,” she says at last. “I find you quite dull.”

“Hmm. In your youth you were quite enraptured.”

“Well, you know, at some point the Fade gets old.”

“I confess I know the feeling.”

She nearly bursts into a strange, surreal kind of laughter. But restrains herself to an ironic smile. “Oh yes?”

“I find I much prefer the waking. I feel — more free, here. I have my own skin.“ He gazes at her, his hand on her cheek warm and real and present. She closes her eyes against it.

“You are bound by no one.” she whispers, relief washing over her not for the first time that day.

Solas answers: “No, my love, I am bound by you.”

 

-o-

 

If she is coming back to life, it feels more like death. They miss the first ship out of Gwaren because she cannot sit up for her tremors; she cannot decide if she is on fire or encased in ice. Her chest _aches_.

The fear sickens her as much as anything. She presses her fingers to her heart, eyes wide with paranoia and lips blue with lyrium — and the world reminds her, as it always does, that she is not her own master.

A pearl of death still blooms in her chest, just under her breast, and it vibrates every day she grows back into the Fade. Today, it sings.

And though her flesh contorts and her breath comes ripped and torn and her head rattles, rattles — she cannot hear the song. The pearl never tugs.

It flexes against the cage of ribs and flesh, but finds no purchase.

For one, wild moment, she considers laying down again in the river. If she could drown the pearl, bury it _forever_ — she’d kill herself and Solas both if that pearl never came of life, never lead her around on a silver lead.

She hasn’t heard the will since the first river-stone, but it can only come back. Why wouldn’t it? And if she _feels_ it now, it can only be a warning. A promise.

It means — whenever she feels — complete, whenever she sews the Fade back into her flesh, the All Mother will come knocking at her door.

 

-o-

 

“Are you completely sure?”

“It's a fool’s plan, Leliana. Don't pretend otherwise.”

Leliana inclines her head, a dark silhouette against the bracing sunlight.

“He loved you. There is a weapon in that.” She turns, crossing her arms over her chest. “It has every chance of working.”

“Foolish,” Lavellan replies, eyes fluttering. “What a desperate creature I’ve become.”

Footsteps. Leliana before her, looking not as sharp this close, not as cold.

“Desperation is not pathetic,” her spymaster whispers, quick and kind. “You are willing to use any means. Sacrifice more than most.”

“That — always seems to be the solution.”

“You haven't faltered yet.”

“I haven't?” she laughs. “I have been weak willed. Ever since the Well.”

The pearl burns, and she clutches at it, her breath hissing through her teeth.

Leliana covers the hand over her heart. “There are other paths. But none so powerful.”

“It will be very difficult.” She reminds herself to breath.

“You’ll need a lot of luck.”

“I’ve never had that.”

Her spymaster laughs. “Oh? A common Dalish spy inheriting the ancient magic of divine power made manifest? Who survived, still, to this day?”

“Like I said — unlucky.”

Leliana smiles at her.

“I wish,” she says, gripping her friend’s hand— “I wish I could pray. I wish I could ask the All Mother for her protection.” Her mouth twists in humor. “She won't answer me. The one I know — she never existed.”

“I know what you mean.”

Lavellan remembers: sun and snow and no purpose, no design, nothing but the tear in the sky to guide the both of them.

“How do you bear it?”

“You trust you need no one’s protection but your own.” Leliana answers. “This will keep your safe, Lavellan. Mythal cannot touch you as long as you are tranquil.”

“There is all the chance he will just — become Mythal’s pride.”

“Maybe, if he felt nothing for you.”

Her pearl burns. She will save herself. If she’s lucky, she'll save him too.

 

-o-

 

The stones only grow worse once they embark at a port city in the Marches. Some hurts she had buried hastily, quickly, desperate to get them under. There was so much pain to forget, so much pain she had to remember now.

One night the punch is a glen. You are so beautiful.

She wakes up sobbing, an old hurt, resigned but deep and unrelenting.

“Why did — how could you — _leave_ —”

She shakes in Solas’ arms, hardly aware he is even awake until he speaks.

“Shh. I'm here now,” he says, “ _Ma vhenan_ , I love you. I know I should have stayed with you. I should have been at your side.”

“You’re a liar!” she hisses, and the moonlight is sharp all around her. “You thought it was funny, didn’t you? Oh what an ignorant _shemlem_ I was, hanging on to your lies. What a fucking fool. How did I not know? Wasn’t it funny?” She gasps, hysteria erupting from her esophagus like bloodspray. “It’s funny, when you think about it — how you lied to me the whole time! Every fucking time I invoked your name, you must have laughed because you knew, you knew, _you knew_ —” she starts laughing “how stupid am I? He could never love you, you are nothing, you are worst than nothing—”

All at once, she snaps back. “I was very upset.” she says faintly, feeling cool and steady. Solas breathes warm against her shoulder, and she knows she’s hurt him. Not just from her words, but from this too. He always hates it when she goes back. It’s usually accidental, but tonight — she had wanted to wade back into the water.

“You are right to be,” he says finally.

Silence.

“You said — _vhenan_.”

“You are my _vhenan_.” He says it with all the certainty of truth.

“I am tranquil.” She reminds him.

“You are — my love. Nothing can change that.” His hold on her tightens.

“It all seems — so distant. I can see it, but not touch it. I want to love you but — I just — it might have always been like this.” The honesty comes easy under tranquility.

Solas nods against her shoulder. “It's difficult to love properly when secrets are being kept.”

Her fingers tap patterns on the nape of his neck. “I was — enraged you didn't tell me the truth.”

The man in her arms breathes, slow and sad. He tells her the truth.

“I still — I don't know what I would have said. I — I was going to tell you. Several times. You'd think with all that practice I would have gotten a speech down.”

“You _wanted_ to tell me?” She had no idea.

“Yes. But I realized — it was no use. I couldn't — see a happy ending. If I told you, you would only hate me.”

She swallows.

“I hoped otherwise, of course.” Solas says quietly. “But it really was only a matter of time before it ended one way or another.”

Another truth she could not deny, knowing what she did now.

“Especially with the _vir’abelsan_ in your head.”

She taps the pearl under her heart. “Right.”

 

-o-

 

“It's old magic,” Dorian had worried. “More legend than anything. And — I mean, I know you'll chitter at me for this, but no Tevinter scholars have ever even looked at this, it's all invalidated and unstudied…”

“Merrill says it makes sense.”

Her pendant scoffs. “That's very comforting. Oh it _feels_ right, my elf instincts!”

“Dorian.”

“How many haunted blood stained mansions have we battled through with stories just like this?”

“Stop being obtuse. This isn't anything like that. The opposite, in fact.”

“Lavellan—” Her name strains through the pendant’s magic, and she closes her eyes.

“I know. Dorian, I know. But it's my choice.”

“A stupid choice!”

She yanks the chain up to lips, whispers harshly into the enchantment: “If you haven't noticed, we are on the edge here! We aren't dealing with an infestation. These aren't poor souls ripping through the fade. This is annihilation. This is an army. This is _my_ responsibility. My _failure_.”

Dorian chuckles mirthlessly. “You're a guilty sod.”

Lavellan smirks. “You're one to talk.”

“All that nobility is insufferable, just so you know.” She ignores the crack in his voice, clutches him to her heart all the same.

 

-o-

 

In the afternoon, she kisses Solas’ lips for the first time since the glen.

And again. “I think I love you today,” she tells him.

He laughs. “Just today?”

“It's a start. Or a continuation.” Lavellan kisses him again, experimentally.

“I’m having a hard time remembering,” she admits.

“Remembering?”

“Who I am — who I was. Before — everything.”

He nods, wraps her in his arms. “You — you were always — trying to remember.”

She nods, thinking. “I love you,” she says again. A question. A benediction. “I remembered that today.”

He wants to ask when she had forgotten, but that is an answer he doesn’t wish to hear.

“I love you too,” he says instead.

 

-o-

 

Dorian liked mint in his tea.

 

-o-

 

It’s months before they find the plains she’d asked him for.

But finally they arrive at open fields. Natural fields, not burnt ashes from the trees, not war-torn farm land. The prairies of the Free Marches. The horizon of her home.

She breaths in wild wheat, and casts away another stone. She might feel like crying. She savours the feeling.

He calls her name. She looks at him, and she feels wrung out, dry-boned; she might break here and now if she keeps thinking about the feeling of the Duke’s blood on her face.

“I — I just thought about. I don’t know if I’ll ever see them again. I thought — in the Beyond. But I don’t know. I — I don’t know. Will they even be there — to blame me? They haven’t tried—”

“We can’t know, _vhenan_ ,” he interrupts her. “We won’t until we join them.”

 

-o-

 

Sera had hugged her when the news from Wycome came out. “Sorry about your family,” she said, and: “I have friends in Wycome.”

 

-o-

 

Lavellan waits until they’re in the tent to admit she’s thought about ending it ever since she woke up in a Chantry cell.

Disturbed, Solas cradles her, clutches her, whispers in languages she doesn’t understand. He says he loves her. He says he will never leave her. He begs for her not to leave him.

“I’m not going to leave you,” she murmurs. “I — what would you do, without me here?”

He just kisses her neck, and her chin, and then her mouth.

 

-o-  


It turns out Feynriel’s escort across the Waking Sea is none other than the Sabrae traitor. Deshanna would be so disgusted.

The woman herself brightens like the sun upon meeting.

“Hello, _lethallan_ , I’ve heard much about you! You’re a very singular elf, you know. A Dalish without her _vallaslin_. Very scandalous.”

“A Dalish practicing blood magic,” she retorts. “Very scandalous.”

Merill laughs. And saddens. “Very often the only viable path is the forbidden one.”

Lavellan knows she, too, is traitor, even if she is the only member of the clan witness to her crimes.

“When do you start the doses?” Merrill asks.

 

-o-

 

He doesn’t like the lyrium. It stains her lips. Makes her skin lose its warmth. But he tolerates it, because she insists she doesn’t want his mana.

“Just let me do this.”

“You said yourself you needed my help—”

“I only needed a dreamer’s help! You know, I was mostly doing you a favor, letting you live and enjoy my company. Not like you deserve any.”

The acid of lyrium thrums in her eyes, and she knows she regrets the words. They’re too sharp, too bright, they wound and she’s had enough of cutting, of taking.

“I’m sorry.”

He turns away from her sharply.

“No — it’s — it’s —”

“I’m sorry I — I don’t feel that —”

“No, you do. You said it, did you not?”

The line of his back is too tight, too drawn, too much like the pained stance he always used to use when he lied to her. She remembers that, now.

“I’m afraid,” she admits, and he glances at her, shocked.

“I would never let anything harm you,” he says, serious. He turns to fully face her. “I only offer on your behalf. The pain alone—” he stops, suddenly. “Are you truly afraid of me?”

He looks on the edge of heartbreak.

“No,” Lavellan says, easily. “I’m just. It’s a thousand things.” She looks down at her hands, her lyrium-stained nailbeds. “I’m — afraid I won’t come back myself. Or, I’m afraid that I will and I’ll hate you. Or you will just look and decide — I’m not worth it.”

She looks at him. “You left me once before.”

He approaches her slowly, like a hunter would an animal wild and dangerous. He looks nothing short of horrified, and she supposes she’s endured enough life-altering phenomena to judge differently, but it is this sight out of all that disconcerts her.

He wraps his arms around her. She listens to the double-beat of their pulses.

He says: “I want nothing from the world than to spend every possible minute of my foolish life with you.”

“You left me,” she reminds him. “Something was wrong with me. You left me.”

“No — no. Vhenan, no. You are perfect.You are unique. I left because I was coward. I left because I was afraid of your broken trust.”

Lavellan barks in bitter laughter, turns her head against his rough tunic, relishes the scratch on her skin. “Well, you should have been. I — I really hated you.” She whimpers. “I’m so sick of this.”

He stills. “Have you considered...that my presence may be complicating your recovery. You have no need for me any longer, as you said. You are fit enough to dream yourself and monitor your own condition.” He pauses. “I could leave.”

She pulls away. Looks him in the eye. “Do you want to leave?”

“No.”

Lavellan nods, absentmindedly, in recognition —  as if she were seeing herself in the mirror. “I don’t want you to leave.”

 

-o-

 

“I don’t want you to leave.”

He’s terrified. His own terror, for once. Not a mirror, or an echo.

“I’m sorry, Cole,” she says. “I’m doing it because it will help.”

“Yes!” he says, sharp and impatient. “You shouldn’t do it.”

 

-o-

 

“Do you regret it?” she asks him at the end of the continent.

The easten coast of the Marches has cool, choppy waters but warm sand, and they sit together as the tide rises. Lavellan buries her toes in the sand, runs the grains between her fingers.

Eventually, he answers: “You'll have to be more specific.”

“Everything.” she says, and, steeling herself, asks: “Would you do it again?

Solas shakes his head. “Never. It was—” He sighs, reaches for her hand. “I should be dead for what I’ve done. But there’s no justice for the dead. The people I killed. No dignity in war or death.”

His fingers curl around hers, and she can’t blame him for the sentiment. She squeezes his hand, breathes the sea salt in.

“I feel that way too.”

Solas makes a displeased sound, prompting her to catch his gaze.

He looks her then, and it reminds her of how he looked in the glen, on precipice of telling her everything. But now he doesn’t shutter close like he did then; now he only brings her hand to his heart and starts explaining in low, quiet tones:

“You...broke through the song. You made everything real. And I had to ignore it, but I couldn't.” His eyes search hers. “I wanted you to save me, so badly. If you could supplant Mythal's song then you could free me of it.”

The wind sways her hair; he grips her palm and leans in ever closer.

“I couldn't tell you the truth. I was too afraid. It’s who I am. I was born and bred of Mythal's pride, made manifest from the dreaming to be her agent. I couldn't not carry out her dream.”

Lavellan watches his eyelids flutter close, delicate and vulnerable.

“It was what I was meant to do.” He says it helplessly, resignation curving his spine and lining his brow.

The wind and the water and a man, caught between the sky and the land; she sways under it all, takes his other hand within her own.

“You are more than that, Solas,” she tells him. “You are more than a madwoman’s bloodlust. You're a man. You're a person.”

She raises one hand to cup his jaw, make him face, make him understand. And when he meets her gaze she realizes that this is an old argument between them. He was so adamant, before, that a spirit could not change its nature by wishing.

“Only because you made me so,” Solas says now, firmly. He smiles summer-sweet at her. “You gave me choice. You did it through no charm or enchantment. You did it by being yourself, a woman who was no shade. A woman who was meant to be loved. I can never thank you enough.”

Lavellan falters. She wants to meet his smile, but her fingers slacken and she lowers her gaze.

“I’m not the woman you fell in love with,” she says, and it’s as plain as bow at her back, the lyrium-white of her hair. Her dark roots may be growing in and her magic may be returning, slow and sly; but she’s changed. Marked. Lost pieces of herself she wouldn’t ever be getting back.

Solas touches her cheek. “You are,” he insists. “You have an old, enduring spirit who cares and protects above all. Even though I no longer feel it—” his fingers flutter over the hair at her temple — “I recognize in you, day after day, just by watching you.”

Lavellan breathes. And raises her head.

“I see it in you too.” She says it through the thickness in her throat, through the stinging at her tearducts. She says it, and he smiles, and then and there she feels a chime, a marriage, the hum of two notes in perfect interval,  a union, a breath, a death.

Maybe everything will be alright.

 

-o-

 

“You truly intend to become tranquil?”

Fenris asks her in the dark of the bunker. Bombs burst overhead.

“You’ve been briefed, have you not?” She might be being too short; but she’s been awake forty hours and Fenris and her still haven’t decided whether they like or despise each other.

“I have. It still seems like foolishness.”

“I had a feeling you would think so.”

Fenris shakes his head. “To give up your magic — in a fight like _this_ —”

“It’s horribly daft of me, isn’t it?”

He chuckles. “I have known dafter plans.” He regards her. “But none so dangerous. I have — seen spells like it, in Minratheous.”

“But nothing _quite_ like it.”

“Exactly so.”

“Well, everyone knows Tevinter stole everything from the elves.”

He continues to watch her face. Lavellan thinks, wildly, that once upon a time she would have seen him and called him a flat ear.

“You won’t like it,” he says at last. “Being numb. Feeling nothing where there should be something, and not remembering why or how it would matter.”

She glances at him. “You — you had the pain, did you not?”

He nods. “So will you.”

 

-o-

 

“Are you sure you want me here?” Solas poses the question over a bubbling pot of stew. She’d shot the rabbit this morning.

“Dearest, I went to spectacular effort to keep you here with me.” She dares to let humour color her voice.

He doesn’t laugh. “I suppose I am asking if you will forgive me.”

Lavellan thinks of the horde — the dead in the sea. She stirs the stew.

“We don't have much else but forgiveness,” she says. “But I forgive you. You knew — it was not right.”

She’s not quite brave enough to look him in the eye.

“But I did it.” His voice is strained, tormented. “I killed them. Cassandra—”

“Yes. They died. There is no justice for the dead. No dignity in war or death.” She looks at him then. “We can only remember them,” she says, a reminder, a promise.

Her fingers itch, thinking of the ink and parchment, and her words, cramped — _and her brother, Anthony—_

“You never met Fenris, did you?” she asks. “He’s a good storyteller. He lived in Seheron once, with the Fog Warriors…”

 

-o-

 

“I’ve never told you about Kirkwall, have I?”

The suite swelters. She doesn’t know why Varric always insists on such a blaze in the fireplace.

“You’ve told me plenty about Kirkwall.”

“But I haven’t told you about after,” he continues. “Right after. What we did after we left that lyrium corpse in the Gallows.”

She watches him with limited interest, uncomfortable and sweaty and already jittery from her dose at dinner.

“We didn’t have a lot of time. There were, uh, some snap decisions.” He rubs the edge of his glass with one thumb. “Hawke left us all to follow Anders. She said to me that he wouldn’t make it a fortnight by himself, in his state. That they could find the mages together, and maybe _then_ —”

He cuts himself off. “She made a bad joke about filtering out which innocents to kill. I don’t remember it now. Shit, I’m getting old.” He drums his fingers on the table. “She did it because she didn’t trust him. Because he had betrayed her trust. And because she didn’t want him to die.” He chuckled. “Fenris was _not pleased_.”

Varric looks at her then, his head drooping, as if he were buckling under some great weight. He sighs, refills his glass.

“I don't know if you could forgive him, but you could protect him. Make him safe again.”

 

-o-

 

In the end, he asks her why she loves him.

For a million reasons. His empathy. Intelligence. Curiosity. She loves that he could never be satisfied — there was always something to be done. Something more to strive for.

And, of course, he understood her. In the dark and light of Haven, he understood her. He was like her.

But now, he presses. Now.

“Now,” she answers, “I love you because you are a good man. The good man that cared for everyone in the Inquisition. Because you do care. You care what happens to people. When we live and when we die.”

 

-o-

 

“So this is where the Inquisitor slums it these days,” purrs a voice.

A ghost. A vision. White and black, and red — across the nose. The Champion of Kirkwall sparkles in the rain, and winks at her.

“You're not real. You're dead.”

The champion cocks her head, laughs. Like some great bird of prey, she perches on the ruined ramparts of — Redcliffe? Adamant? She doesn’t know. She doesn’t know.

“Ouch. Sometimes I wonder where the respect went. I saved a city once.” Her teeth flash in the moonlight.

“I didn't save you.” Green and black and blood.

“Hmm,” the champion agrees. “Wonder if Varric ever forgave you for that one.”

It's just an image. Some spirit refracting around her. Her guilt. Her grief. It — it could even be what’s left of Hawke. It could be.

“I'm sorry,” she says.

The champion sniffs. “Oh, don't worry about it. I'm hardly your first victim. Or your last. Gals like you and me — we kill everyone around us.”

“No.”

“No? My dear Inquisitor, look at the facts. Our dead could fill a sea.”

She refuses to cry. “It was a war.”

“Hmm, yes. Twin generals. The wolf and, well, whatever you are. Who is that, again?” That grin again. Too bright.

“I'm Lavellan.” Calm. Collected. Remember. She had to remember.

“That's a clan,” Hawke corrects. “An obsolete one. They're all dead. And, oh, right, the Inquisition is gone. No Inquistor, no First. What's left after that?”

Hawke’s gaze is keen, sharp, disquieting. And then she smiles again, slowly this time.

“Ah. You think you're something just cause you love somebody. I’ll call you out on that one, sister.” All at once, the champion lands in front of her onto the road like a thunderclap. “Love doesn't protect you,” she says. “It won't make you whole or human or alive. They all still die. That's the truth: Love can kill.”

Hawke gestures, wildly, into rain. Towards the forest. The forest — she burned a forest, once.

“His sure did!” Hawke intones. “He did it to you!”

No, that’s not right.

“I did it.” The river did it.

“Only because he gave you no choice. And killed them all in the process. Cassandra. Feynriel. Dorian. You still haven't seen Varric, or Harding, or Fenris — they could all be dead but you ran away. You fled. And all for the sake of their murderer.”

Hawke looms in front of her, and she can see the dried blood on her collarbone, the trail leading to the puncture wound.

“How can you forgive him? He killed your friends! He killed me! He deserves —” Hawke laughs, wild and cawing. “You _love_ him. You _forgive_ him. Love conquers all, huh?” She grins wickedly.

“I'm still alive, aren't I?” Lavellan challenges.

All at once Hawke shrinks, pales, taps her chin thoughfully. “True,” she allows. “That’s one you have over me.”

Lavellan can’t place the expression on her face.

The ghost regards her. “I always wondered — what forgiveness would look like,” it says, and blows away.

 

-o-

 

Solas’ thoughtful care in Skyhold had nothing compared to his attentions as a housemate.

He dotes on her constantly, wary of her headaches, always alert to her discomfort. His hovering recedes some now that she sticks for weeks, now that the river bed is the aberration and not the norm. Still, she can feel his underlying paranoia rolling off of him.

Still, he smiles. He grins at the morning dew and the chirruping birds. He laughs at the sky and the halla and describes to her the history of each camp, the ones who lived and died, the lovers. The history. The life.

“I love it,” he tells her. “Remembering them. Laughing with them. It — makes me hope. That nothing dies. It just changes. One day — someone will remember I love you, long after we have passed.”

 

-o-

 

It’s quiet in the woods. He is asleep at camp. She is trying to light her fingertips on fire.

They burn, sparking with heat, but don’t alight. Her mana snaps and flutters, pushed with no release.

And, faintly, Lavellan remembers dipping her hands in a river, Deshanna over her shoulder, and now her hands are full of claws, ice solid and strong clicking against her palm. She feels wild. She feels like Hawke, strong, soaring, ready to strike.

With a thought her talons shatter, and she remembers who she is. Casts a barrier against the falling leaves. Imagines, for a moment, the tug of the Breach as she steps through her forms. Imagines Cassandra at her shoulder, her watchful gaze.

The burning comes easier, after that.

 

-o-

 

“Good,” Deshanna says. “You are an exceptional pupil, da’len. What _focus!”_

 

-o-

 

Solas is beyond delighted. He knows immediately when he wakes, taking her hands and laughing and crying and he keeps saying how he can feel her, he can see her, she’s so real and she’s amazing and he can’t believe she came back.

His magic rushes around her, and it’s overwhelming, but not in a bad way.

“I love you,” he tells her, again and again.

 

-o-

 

She starts writing down what she remembers. Anything and everything. Events. Battles. Books she's read. How Leliana laughed, when she did.

She discovers Keeper magic anew, remembers transcribing methods and spells as a girl, only a teenager, recording a record long burnt and lost. Now here again, steady in her hand. Muscle memory paints the magic in elven, but she repeats it in common. How to heal. How to cleanse. Purify. Shelter. Rip. Storm. Protect.

She makes a little table out of root just outside the cottage. She feels — ridiculously proud, satisfied. Solas smiles to see it, asks her if she would mind if he painted it.

She writes down Deshanna’s tales. How they differed from those rotting in the _Vir Dirthara_. And how they were the same. Delineated myth and truth. Muddled it.

She wonders if the Dalish ever honored _anything_ worth knowing, if there was pride in being Dalish, pride untinged by death and war. She goes back and forth, argues each case.

(what she wouldn't give for another sun scorched day; to see the faces of her family and think herself free and not a _shemlen_ slave)

In the end, Lavellan returns to this — the warmth of her Keeper’s palm of her cheek, the promise — _never again shall we submit._

Solas thinks they should remember all of it. Everything.

“The truth of the violence speaks for itself,” he says, running his fingers over the crease in her parchment. “To erase the victim or the murder alike is a crime. Not any one of us does anything for any one reason, and it should not be mislead that we do.”

 

-o-

 

They are grinding herbs together — some for cooking, some for salves — at least one that would help her sleep easier. She is grinding into the mortar when he suddenly stills next to her.

“Solas?”

He looks to her, and it’s the look he had gotten sometime. It had always unsettled her. He gave it to her in the glen, and it every nightmare following.

“I just — I can’t believe I’m here. I’d never thought — we could do something as trivial as this. Without threat. Without lies.”

Lavellan looks down at their handiwork. “I like it,” she says.

“I love it,” he tells her, drawing her gaze. “I don’t know what forces created a soul such as yours, but I thank them every day. You are so beautiful.” He touches her cheek, and they are under the trees, and this might be healing. Or forgiveness. Or it may be living. The excision of death from her heart. She has finally cut deep enough, carved herself into a happy truth.

For a moment, she is deathly afraid she has fallen back into the river bed.

But this is heavier than that, more meaty. Lavellan feels the weight of his gaze in her bones and her grieving heart still rattles and her throat is thick with tears and she is grateful, too. She is grateful she isn’t lost, and she isn’t dead.

She kisses his lips because she is alive, and because the world is better for it.

 

-o-

 

The glen waits for her in the place of the river bed. It doesn’t shine like her memories. No, everything is dead. A barren battlefield. It would surprise her if she hadn't become immune to surprises. A witch waits for her at its altar, kneeling at the feet of the All Mother’s skeleton.

“You’ve finally come back, eh girl?” Mythal inclines her head, gesturing, as if this were the altar which she had sacrificed her life. As if they had made some deal. She was done striking bargains with ancient gods.

“You were watching me,” she deflects. She had felt it. Mythal’s voices — never sounding. Just observing. No will but her own.

“As I always have.” The witch gets up, turns to face her. She’s lost all the grandeur of an ancient destroyer, a vengeful dragon. Now she regards her with old humor. “You know, that was very clever of you. Nice bit of magic you pulled off — the tranquility imitation.”

Lavellan tenses. Now she would be betrayed. Now she would fail. Now she would die.

Mythal smiles. ”Exquisite tactical move.” She praises. “You knew exactly what would destroy my best general.”

“Your last general,” Lavellan mutters.

“True, but also my best. My Pride.”

Lavellan waits for retribution, the ire of the divine. But nothing comes. Nothing but the babble of distant waters. The All Mother regards her with tranquility.

Well, if the old bat insists in invading her dreams she might as well get some answers. “Solas said he stopped feeling your will.”

“Hmm, yes. I suppose you’d wonder about that.” The witch taps a nail to her mouth. Likely considering what lie to tell her.

“I understood it was not something that would just — stop. Unless you willed otherwise.”

“I did not set him free, if that’s what you’re asking.”

“So you changed your mind. About the world.”

“Hmm, not quite. More like your Solas stopped agreeing with me. He no longer thought it was worth it. He was always not completely convinced. You ruined him.” Her eyes twinkle.

“I ruined him from your genocidal plans? Oh, I do apologize.”

The witchs barks in laughter. “Thank you,” she says. “ _Millennia_ of blood and sweat, and he wakes up and falls in love with the first pretty face he sees. Men,” she says tartly. “Fear not, sweet thing. I am not truly vexed. I thank you, for reminding me.”

The evanuris approaches her, slowly, with respect. And her eyes don’t glow with old and ancient souls. Nothing but the energy of a spirit born anew.

“If you want real magic, you cannot sacrifice the blood of others. You must only cut at yourself, and not expect to get anything back. The true witches know that. You silenced any will of mine the moment you made the first incision.”

And then Mythal plucks the last remnant of her soul out of Lavellan’s heart. Retrieves it, relishes the warmth of completion, the totality of death.

“I have faith in you, _lethallan_. Hold onto that indomitable will of yours.”

All the flowers of the world bloom at once.

 

-o-

 

**R** _ecall the word you gave:_

_to count your way across the depths of this arid world,_

_where you would yoke the waves,_

_and lay a bed of shining pearls!_

_I dream it every night:_

_the ringing of the pail,_

_the motes of sand dislodged,_

_the shucking, quick and bright;_

_the twinned and cast-off shells reveal a single_

heart of **white**

 

 

joanna newsom, _divers_

  
  
  
  
  
  
  


**Author's Note:**

> *ron swanson voice* Give me all the angst and heartbreak you have. Wait, listen son: you heard 'a lot of angst and heartbreak,' what I said was 'give me ALL the angst and heartbreak you have'


End file.
